So She Did: The Female Mentor That Changed My Life

I always expected that I’d spend my last summer before starting college binge-watching TV, eating pizza, and dealing with anxiety about my freshman year. Instead, I ended up exploring my recent acquaintance with the feminist movement through an internship with So She Did, an organization related to women’s empowerment. I decided to join the organization because it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get a different perspective on feminism and my own ideas about empowerment. Sure enough, working there resulted in one of the best and most interesting summers of my life.

So She Did focuses on a positive and personalized understanding of feminism: it emphasizes individual improvement by showing young women how to say no, how to make a great first impression, how to conquer their fears and …

Jessica Valenti On What It Will Take To Make A Woman President

Jessica Valenti, called one of the Top 100 Inspiring Women in the world by The Guardian, is the author of four books on feminism,politics, and culture. Valenti founded Feministing.com, which Columbia Journalism Review called “head and shoulders above almost any writing on women’s issues in mainstream media.” Her writing has appeared in Washington Post, The Nation, The Guardian (UK), The American Prospect, Ms. Magazine, Salon, and Bitch magazine. She has won a Choice USA Generation Award and the 2011 Hillman Journalism Prize for her work with Feministing.

MS: What qualities do you think women bring to positions of influence and leadership that the United States and the world most need now?

JV: I don’t want to generalize. I don’t know that women, as a broad category, have

Silencing the Fear: Coming Out As A Feminist

In a day and age in which many people believe feminism is no longer needed or just outright misunderstand what feminism actually is, coming out and saying the words “I am a feminist” can be quite daunting. Doing so as a teenager is particularly intimidating. Considering that so many people our age believe stereotypes such as all feminists are lesbians who don’t shave their legs and burn their bras, it’s hardly surprising that many of us are reluctant to openly declare our belief in gender equality.

The truth is feminism is only a dirty word because many people don’t know what it actually is. It’s not hard to find out the truth, though. Even Wikipedia knows that “Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending …

A Conversation with Young Author Alex Schnee

When I heard about Alex Schnee, an author and student at Sarah Lawrence college, and her recently published novel, Shakespeare’s Lady, I knew that I had to talk with her. We decided to Skype about both publishing books around the same time, what our experiences were like and why some view young women our age as complacent.

Julie Zeilinger: Ok, so can you just start by explaining briefly what your book is about?

Alex Schnee: Sure. It’s about the “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Nobody really knows who she is, but I found a woman living at that time who has been propositioned as the dark lady by several scholars. I tried to weave together a fictional romance between William Shakespeare and this woman, Emilia Bassano …